Chapter 1

The music was too loud, a hammer against my already broken mind.

I floated, or maybe I just *was*, above the glittering chaos of the party.

Below me, Ethan Cole, my husband, laughed.

His arm was tight around Tiffany Vance, her blonde hair catching the flashing lights.

Tiffany. My high school tormentor. Now his new star.

They were celebrating her. Her rise.

My fall.

I remembered the pills, a desperate handful.

Then the cold, the long drop from the balcony of our sterile apartment.

A final, silent scream for him to see me, to hear me.

He hadn't. He was here, with her.

My body was somewhere else, cold and broken, but I was here.

A spectator to my own erasure.

Pain, a dull echo, no longer physical, but it was there, a shadow clinging to my new, strange existence.

He raised a glass, Tiffany preened.

"To Tiffany," Ethan's voice boomed, "the future of music."

The crowd roared.

I wanted to scream, "What about Sarah? What about your wife?"

But no sound came. I had no voice here.

He looked so happy, so free.

My depression, he'd called it a "phase," an "inconvenience."

My trauma, "melodrama."

Now, I was just gone. And he was thriving.

Three years dissolved like mist.

I watched the world, a silent, invisible witness.

The raw ache of my death had faded into a constant, weary sorrow.

Then, one day, I felt a pull, a tether to my old life.

Ethan was in his sterile office, all glass and steel.

Tiffany was there, pacing, her voice sharp.

"I need this memoir, Ethan. It has to be raw, authentic. It needs that... touch."

She paused, a sly look in her eyes.

"You know, Sarah was actually a decent writer. For all her... issues."

Ethan barely looked up from his phone.

"Sarah? She's probably holed up in that dump of a hometown, feeling sorry for herself."

"Find her," Tiffany purred, running a hand down his arm. "She owes you. She owes *me*."

Owes them? My spectral form trembled with a rage I couldn't express.

Ethan grunted. "Fine. I'll get someone on it. If she's even still around."

He wanted something from me, even now.

The thought was a cold spike through my ghostly heart.